In the May 11 & 25 SN: High-tech cricket farming, AI learns from Minecraft, looking for lithium, a new hominid species is named, signs of life in dead pig brains, Cherokee cave texts decoded, water molecules on the moon and more.

Sometime around 9 p.m., before the second leg of a cross-country flight, my just-turned-4-year-old decided she had had enough. She let out a scream and went full noodle right at the end of a moving walkway in Chicago Midway. I had the baby in a carrier and a death grip on my older daughter’s hand, so it was up to my husband to scoop up our enraged, sweaty middle child and keep hold of her and...

At the beginning of 2017, parents and pediatricians got new peanut guidelines that, for most kids, are very pro-peanut. My colleague and fellow mom Meghan Rosen wrote about the recommendations, issued from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

This “let them eat nuts” advice is based in part on a large and unusually clear dataset from a study that looked at babies at...

When we brought our first baby home from the hospital, our pediatrician advised us to have her sleep in our room. We put our tiny new roommate in a crib near our bed (though other containers that were flat, firm and free of blankets, pillows or stuffed animals would have worked, too).

The advice aims to reduce the risk of sleep-related deaths, including sudden infant death syndrome, or...

The juice saga continues. The American Academy of Pediatrics updated their official ruling on fruit juice, recommending none of the sweet stuff before age 1. Published in the June Pediatrics, the recommendation is more restrictive than the previous one, which advised no juice before age 6 months.

The move comes from the recognition that whole fruits — not just the sweet, fiberless liquid...

One of the most pressing and perplexing questions parents have to answer is what to do about screen time for little ones. Even scientists and doctors are stumped. That’s because no one knows how digital media such as smartphones, iPads and other screens affect children. The American Academy of Pediatrics recently put out guidelines, but that advice was based on a frustratingly slim body of...

Last week, I wrote about how powerfully protective whooping cough vaccines can be when babies receive their first dose before even being born, from their pregnant mothers-to-be. As I was looking through that study, another of its findings struck me: Babies didn’t seem to get any extra whooping cough protection when their moms were vaccinated after giving birth.

Six hours before I gave birth to my son, our labor and delivery nurse started choking.

The cause, we later discovered, was a jar of peanuts that my unsuspecting husband had cracked open for a snack. Our fast-acting (and highly allergic) nurse rushed out of the room and made it to her EpiPen in time. She was OK, to our immense relief, and we managed to not endanger anyone else’s life that...

Screens are everywhere. They adorn walls, perch on the backs of car seats and warm our hands. No one knows yet whether all of these screens, and their alluring displays and connections to the world, have any long-term effects on us. There is one group of people, though, for whom these ever-present screens may be particularly worrisome — kids.

When babies are ready for solid foods, the meal usually arrives on a spoon. Parents scoop up pureed carrots, liquefied banana or soupy rice cereal and deliver it straight to their baby’s mouth (or forehead). But a different way of introducing solids is gaining ground. Called baby-led weaning, the approach is based on letting the baby feed herself whole foods such as a soft pear or a spear of...

When someone uses the phrase “sleeping like a baby,” it’s obvious that they don’t really know how babies sleep. Many babies, especially newborns, are lousy sleepers, waking up every few hours to rustle around, cry and eat. For creatures who sleep up to 18 hours per 24-hour period, newborns are exhausting.

That means that bone-tired parents are often desperate to get their babies to...